Tag: gcc

To fill in the gap since the last post, I thought I’d get the notes which had been collecting up, posted here. pkgsrc got a mention in the Quarterly FreeBSD status report. My bulkbuild effort started on FreeBSD/amd64 10.1-RELEASE but thanks to my friend James O’Gorman, I was able to expand to FreeBSD 11-CURRENT and recently switched over from 10.1-RELEASE to 10.2-RELEASE.
I got the idea to try to pkgsrc on Android after someone posted a screenshot of their Nexus 7 tablet with the bootstrap process completed.

There are several projects on the google play store for running the user land built from a Linux/arm distro in a chroot on Android.
The first project I tried was Debian noroot (based on the tweet that inspired me), it spawned a full X11 desktop to run & so the process was painfully slow.

Switching to GNUroot Debian which just ran a shell in the chroot was much faster at extracting the pkgsrc archive though bootstrap still took long. The best result was with Linux deploy using an Arch Linux user land, everything was very snappy.

I spent a little time with OmniOS and “addressed” the outstanding issues which prevented it from working out of the box. shells/standalone-tcsh was excluded on OmniOS which prevented the version of tcsh shipped with the OS from being clobbered during bulkbuilds. The other issue was what appeared to be a problem with gettext but turned to be an issue with the compiler shipped with OmniOS. This became a topic of discussion on what the correct solution to the problem is. The GCC provided with OmniOS is built with Fortran support and includes the OpenMP libraries (I’m guessing this is the reason for the libraries) in its private lib directory inside /opt/gcc-4.8.1/lib, it turns out that gettext will make use of OpenMP libraries if it detects them during configure stage which I’ve not been able to find a concrete answer for why, the GCC documentation don’t say more than a paragraph about the OpenMP libraries themselves (libgomp) either. The problem was that GCC was exposing its private library in the link path but not in the run path, this meant you could produce binaries which would compile fine but would not run without having to play around with the runtime linker. In my case I’d previously added the private library locate to the runtime linkers search path as a workaround, I disabled the OpenMP support in devel/gettext-tools and that’s where the discussion began. Basically, it’s not possible to expose the private library location to the linker because that would cause issues with upgrades. The location should not be exposed by the compiler in the first place (I guess this was for the convenience of building the actual release of OS?). Richard Palo pursued the issue further and I’m informed that future releases of OmniOS will move libgomp out from this private location to /usr/lib so that it’s in the default library search path.

With the introduction of the GPLv3 license, GNU projects have been switching to the new license. This causes problems for projects outside the GNU eco-system which utilise them if the terms of the new license are unacceptable for them. Each project has dealt with it differently, for OpenBSD they maintain the last version which was available under GPLv2 & extend the functionality it provides. Bitrig has inherited some of this through the fork. Through the bulkbuilds it was revealed that the upstream version of binutils has no support for OpenBSD/amd64 or Bitrig at all. Adding rudimentary support was easily achieved by lifting some of the changes from the OpenBSD CVS repo. While at present I’m running bulkbuilds against a patched devel/binutils which I’ve not upstreamed or committed for both OpenBSD & Bitrig, I am thinking that for OpenBSD we should actually just use the native version and not attempt to build the package. For Bitrig, there is already a separate package in their ports tree for a newer version of binutils, it’s pulled in alongside other modern versions of tools under the meta/bitrig-syscomp package so it makes sense to mimic that behaviour.

Coming to the realisation that stock freedesktop components were not going to build on OpenBSD, I switched to using X11_TYPE=native to utilise what’s provided by Xenocara. Despite the switch, pkgsrc still attempted to ignore the native version of MesaLib and try to build its own, the build would fail and prevent a couple of thousand packages from building.
This turned out to be because of a test to detect the presence of X11 in mk/defaults/mk.conf, it was testing for the presence of an old path which no longer exists. As this test would fail, the native components would be ignored & pkgsrc components would be preferred. The tests for OpenBSD & Bitrig were removed & now default to a default of an empty PREFER_PKGSRC variable. The remaining platforms need to be switched over after testing now.

As Mac OS X on PowerPC gets older and older with time, the requirement for defining MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET grows ever more redundant, Ruby now ships with it & unless it’s defined, you will find that it’s not possible to build the ruby interpreter any more. I am considering setting MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.4" for PowerPC systems running Tiger or Leopard so that packages could be shared between the two but have not had a chance to test on Leopard yet to commit it. I somehow ended up on a reply list for a ticket in the Perl RT for dealing with this exact issue there. They opted to cater for both legacy & modern version of OS X by setting the necessary variables where necessary.

Since I last posted about dealing with pkgsrc on my PowerBook earlier this week, a patch has been committed which solves the linker issue on lang/gcc45 along with another fix related to how stripping of binaries is handled on Darwin. Unfortunately PR/48740 mentioned gcc44 to 46 suffer from the same issue but the patch has not been applied to gc44 or 46, I’m waiting to hear back from the committer.
One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post is that there is another issue with build process for GCC. There appears to be a deadlock issue where sh sits there chewing up CPU & context switching, at this point, aborting the build with & restarting again allows the build to continue.
Attaching to sh with gdb does not give any further insight as to what’s going on 🙁

/* The definitions in this file are common to all processor types
running Darwin, which is the kernel for Mac OS X. Darwin is
basically a BSD user layer laid over a Mach kernel, then evolved
for many years (at NeXT) in parallel with other Unix systems. So
while the runtime is a somewhat idiosyncratic Mach-based thing,
other definitions look like they would for a BSD variant. */

/* Although NeXT ran on many different architectures, as of Jan 2001
the only supported Darwin targets are PowerPC and x86. */

/* One of Darwin's NeXT legacies is the Mach-O format, which is partly
like a.out and partly like COFF, with additional features like
multi-architecture binary support. */

There are two openchronos projects, there’s the original OpenChronos project & the continuation openchronos project.
The openchronos code has a few modifications which are not upstream in poelzi’s OpenChronos repo, most importantly the changes to build under mspgcc 4, I was unable to build under mspgcc 3 as support for some versions of the MSP430 were missing, this may just be an issue specific to version currently in FreeBSD ports tree however.
To build the openchronos firmware on FreeBSD you’ll need the following ports installed:devel/git
devel/msp430-libc
lang/python/
At the config stage of msp430-libc leave the “Use new msp430-gcc4 compiler” option left on & build.
Once everything is installed clone the repo listed on the openchronos website with git.
The config process for openchronos uses python & depends on the locale to be defined correctly, otherwise running gmake config on the shell will cause an error such as:UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2503' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)2
Defining LC_CTYPE with the appropriate UTF-8 encoding for your locale resolvers this, run locale -a for a list of supported types which you can declare.
Once that’s defined, running gmake config should show the configuration script, if you’re still receiving errors you may want to run gmake clean & try again.
You need to check the frequency setting is correct depending on the model of watch you bought.
Now save your configuration & run gmake to compile the code.
If you’re unable to compile the image successfully as the image generated is too large (see the problems section of README) either set “Metric only code” option in configure or try this patch which reduces the size of the image (Thanks to Andrey Ulanov for the pointer).
If build completes successfully, you’ll have two files in the build directory named eZChronos.elf & eZChronos.txt.
At this point I cheated & used Windows to flash the watch wirelessly.
Set the watch in rFbSL mode & run the Chronos data logger app, go to the wireless update tab, point it to the txt files & press “Update Watch”
A counter should show up to display the progress on the watch.
Once the flash is complete, all the elements on the LCD display should switch on

About Me

I'm Sevan Janiyan and this is my tech blog, where I post about projects I'm working on.
I work as a UNIX systems adminstrator, providing consultancy services on a variety of platforms at Venture 37.